This past week featured some classic TTRPG discourse - notable not just for the eternal recurrence of topic, but that the leading luminary in the actual play/streaming space (Brennan Lee Mulligan) seemed to be wading in. I've largely stopped paying as much attention to this debate (in no small part because it's usually localized to Twitter, which I don't enjoy being on) but I do think it's fun to think, read, and talk about. I'm inching closer to writing the first part of that manifesto I've been threatening, and even if I recover my faculties and divert from that particular madness, I think it would at least be fun to write something about it. At the very least, I think it would be fun to make my friends read it.
Anyway, that's part of why I missed my usual window for a weekly delve, and why I think I'm reaching for something that advertises itself as philosophical. Today I'm reading Jesse Burneko's Dungeons & Dilemmas!
This is a slightly different text than I've looked at before! It is "a collection of system agnostic techniques" that you might bring to your fantasy adventuring game (or worldbuilding/game prep?). I'm curious what it will be like - will it have procedures, like a "hack" to lay over a system? Will its advice be almost analogous to an adventure or setting supplement? Maybe it will just read like a nicely edited, long form blog. It's fairly long - 57 pages, which puts it nicely in a sort of middle ground between some of the games I've been reading here, but that's a lot of text for something that might be adjacent to the actual game!
This is an offering from 2020's ZineQuest, and even though there was a lot happening in February at that time, I remember pretty clearly seeing it and thinking "oh I'm interested in reading someone's thoughts about ethics in fantasy adventuring!" I got the pdf about two years ago, says itch, which is maybe why I didn't crack it open, but it's definitely been jostling around in the back of my brain for that time. I don't know that I expect to be surprised - not because I imagine myself a more powerful philosopher than Burneko, but just because the space is pretty well explored, and I think we've been trending towards more discussion on this topic since 2020 - but I enjoy reading peoples' takes just the same. So, I think those are the two things I'm looking for - is this an example of a new mode or sort of ttrpg text, and does it contain anything I haven't read about before?
The introduction is a quick single page, that lays out the general structure - part one will go into a "process" for creating "dungeon scenarios that are more emotionally engaging and morally complex while retaining a focus on exploration, action and adventure," part two is a "toolkit" to expand your thinking to the "campaign" level, and there's a third and final part that's a review of common "topics". But there's also an interesting background, an answer to why should we care, as well as a promise of what we can expect.
The why should we care is by now fairly familiar (and Burneko calls out that it's a common criticism) that these games are "about 'killing things and taking their stuff'". I left in that "about" because it's Burneko's word there, and probably carefully considered (but especially relevant, given this week's topic). He points out, too, that this line of critique can go deeper, towards understanding the parallels with the colonial history of the actual world we live in. I'm on board! I think even in 2020, this criticism existed in basically a complete form (although I don't have a citation on that). What I do have is pushback on this criticism - the thing I most often think about (and see cited) is Zedeck Siew's twitter thread (from 2019, even!) and later tumblr post on the topic. And of course, the common refrain from a certain subsection of the improv storytelling/osr true believer venn diagram that the most fun they have almost never involves using the rules (we'll come back to this position and I'll give it a more serious treatment there - but I don't mean this to be dismissive of their position). Burneko adds that the goal of his process is not to remove violence as an option, and that indeed it might remain the "best" solution to these dilemmas - the goal is instead "to give violence greater meaning and ground it in real stakes."
In line with that, we get the promise - Burneko says that "[t]he outcome of this process is an adventure that will take on personal meaning for the players. It’s not just a place to be explored; it is a place to be understood and judged" and that these adventures will "challenge" players as to how to use their characters' powers. That sounds great! Let's see!
First up: Building a Storied Dungeon. This is maybe a little late to note the zine's subtitle - "The Dungeon as Narrative Framework and Encounters as Moral Puzzles". This section is seven pages long, and takes the form of a list of steps, including tables to roll on and examples! It's fairly straightforward, but a little more formulaic than I think I was expecting - following this process faithfully means every dungeon you make will always have been abandoned and then repopulated by someone else. The text gives us permission to skip as many steps as we desire (which is courteous, I suppose). I wish the steps were more interested in explaining what kind of complexity or context they're meant to provide. Instead, each step comes with a kind of narrative of the dungeon's development, which also feels kind of arbitrary. Ex: in Step 3, Something Lingers, the text suggests that this is a good time to introduce the dungeon's "first, current, and active element" but it seems equally reasonable that you might have settled on that element as part of the first step. The first step, which involves grounding your dungeon's original purpose in a strong emotion, I think is the most useful- and newest-to-me. Overall it's a solid but kind of inflexible procedure.
The second section (which looks still within our "first part," the process for making interesting dungeons) is The Dungeon as a Narrative Structure. We're warned against comparing too directly to books, movies, and other kinds of fiction. We won't be getting directly into the specific dimensions, which the text notes is important for some games, but instead thinking of dungeons as graphs of connected nodes.
This section is only 5 pages, but I have quibbles! The analysis here is not very deep, and the "lessons" pulled out of that analysis I find suspect. The biggest offender to me is the distinction between what the text calls your dungeon's critical path and outliers. In addition to getting kind of lost in the weeds (much is made of identifying the "longest shortest path" when what actually matters to the text are just the necessary nodes), the text's advice is to put the need-to-know information in the unmissable nodes, and the supplementary information in the outliers, to "reward thorough exploration." I think that's bogus! The first part, to make the necessary information part of the necessary path through the space, is, I think, a good tip. But if the point is to make dungeons that feel deep and meaningful, isn't that supplementary context also necessary?
The third section is Emotional Encounters. This is again a pretty quick section at 5 pages, and the introductory paragraph says that the focus here is on making sure that each encounter involves at least one of "information, choice, and consequences" - the ICI doctrine, although Impact has been synonymized. There's also a warning against imagining encounters as "fixed" (eg, they're not programmed with specific outcomes, as in a video game). The text takes us through what it imagines as the common encounter types, and find the "narrative energy" in each of them.
These are all great! I think all of them are nicely expressed here, even if I've encountered the basic idea elsewhere. The writeup on empty rooms, for example, is fairly familiar - they're exposition, they're sources of (incomplete) information, they build tension, etc. But some of it is fun and and useful reframing, like being redirected to think about that great first step in dungeon building, imagining the purpose of the dungeon and how it's expressed in this room, and that it's alright to let players take their time exploring and investigating. The section on magic items has some useful suggestions on how to make them little moral dilemmas of their own, including tying them to the tragedy of the dungeon (and an implicit or explicit challenge to the characters if they can wield power more responsibly). The traps section is maybe my favorite writing on traps that I've ever seen, enough to make me actually interested in traps again. The villains section is fun, and most of the advice remains interestingly put, even when familiar. The step-by-step process for creating dungeons, however, kind of underplays the villain's role, or at least doesn't seem to me to accord very nicely with the advice here.
The write-up on monsters is nice, but interestingly doesn't have anything to say at all about "monstrous humanoids" - I read the intention here as "actually calling some humanoids monstrous is fucked up and leads to the boring murder hobo playstyle as discussed above" but I think it's probably worth being explicit. According to this text, monsters are explicitly "the results of decay" and are most "interesting" if they're results of "moral decay." This is probably not sufficient to avoid racism - most of the time I'm hearing "moral decay" these days is from shitty fascist twitter assholes with roman statue pfps, for example. It's also a little particular - I think, for example, large, fire breathing lizards could make for an interesting monster and dilemma, even if they're totally natural; and relegating them to a mere "physical decay" seems to me like underselling them. Since Dungeon Meshi is hot right now, that's an alternative framing of monsters that I find pretty interesting and fun - monsters not just as obstacles or evocations of the theme, but as expressions of the fantastic world and its ecosystem. I could cite Mouth Brood here, too!
Burneko says that this framing "opens up more options for dealing with the monster than simply seeking its destruction" - but I actually think that if all these monsters are sourced from "moral decay" that destruction probably looks pretty good a lot of the time! But it's a small quibble - I think his thoughts on other outcomes an encounter with a monster might lead to are good and fun, and I do like trying (some) monsters metaphysically to the tragedy of the place.
This section wraps up with two codas. First, that violence remains an answer to these dilemmas, but hopefully the consequences of the encounters and information gleaned can linger, even if the villains and monsters are dead. Second, that you don't have to care about how "powerful" the monsters and villains are in terms of combat rules, since the dilemma has other options besides violence. I think both of these are a little incomplete, or could use a little teasing out. The other thing I've been thinking of is Jay Dragon's post, comparing a goblin fight to a puzzle, and Sydney Icarus' post about this week's discourse. The trick is that, in most dungeon adventure games, if I want to know I have control about what will happen in the game, my usual recourse is to appeal to the rules/procedures, and the most detailed (and often most obvious and empowering) procedures are for simulating murder. As Burneko admits, a lot of the dilemmas created by his method do lend themselves to being answered by violence. That's not a problem! But I don't think that there's quite enough here to feel totally justified that "the questions will linger" and/or "this method will make any encounter fun regardless of how you choose to implement the combat mechanics".
That does it for our "first part" - we were promised a second part about expanding this thinking to a campaign level, and so begins Campaigns & Conundrums. It's again a pretty quick read at 5 pages, although these are a little denser than the previous sections. The fundamental conceit here is to populate a region with several dungeon problems - to eschew a grand escalation and instead keep the scale smaller, more local. I think the focus on smaller scale is something I often prefer, but I don't find the advice "just make a lot of dungeons" very helpful. The six step process from before gets a seventh campaign level step, but it is a not-very-inspiring prompt to just think about how the problem becomes more complex over time.
I was really hoping for some tools that could help me think about how to instantiate my dilemmas in the wider world, even at a local scale! So it's kind of disappointing that the advice here is less useful and wieldable than, say, Dungeon World's.
Although the bigger picture here isn't very compelling to me, there are a few tidbits aimed at some of the smaller logistical or procedural aspects of running a campaign, like "how do the players hear about the dungeon" or "how many things do I throw at my players at once." The thoughts on how to make compelling rumors are pretty nice, for example. The rest of it isn't too exciting to me, although it seems broadly useable.
We're on page 30 of 57, with one part still advertised - a review of some common dungeon adventure topics. We got some of the topics I was expecting in Campaigns and Conundrums, so I'm curious what distinguishes them here. And is it really 27 pages of this? Luckily not - another 5 page section, with the last twenty pages given to an example dungeon. It's time for Advanced Dungeons and Dilemmas!
This section doesn't quite catch my interest, in the end. We do get a few thoughts from Burneko on his use of the term "monster," addressing my earlier criticism! There are a few moves here that Burneko makes in his categorization that I wouldn't - things like the best use of "monstrous nature," or distinguishing between people-fey and monster-fey. I'm amused by Burneko's use of dragons as an exercise left to the reader.
Besides monsters, the topics addressed here are journeying through towns, random encounters, and skills. Each of these has a little kernel of wisdom. For example, I've heard it before but I like the advice to think of tables of random encounters as a "color palette," and using the trick of rolling twice to think about how the two entries interact with each other. It's fine!
The very last section is an adventure, called For the Love of Life and Death. It's a pretty nice demonstration of what the method can produce, although I think it's also indicative of the method's limits. The story: an order of weird monks made a plant woman monster, fell into her thrall, and were destroyed. Later, a cult of weird necromancers came to the monastery to use it as their base of operations, discovered the plant magic (but not its source) and now are inadvertently doing the plant monster's work for it. When the players come to investigate the disappearances, they'll find the cultists and the sense of an ancient mystery, and unraveling all the clues will surely lead to an interesting dilemma about what to do about any of this!...
Mostly! The necromancers seem pretty tacked-on, and ancillary to what's happening - they function kind of as a blind (albeit a weird and fun one). I agree that there's something neat there - players who go in swords swinging and spells slinging might kill all the necromancers, only to later find out that they weren't really responsible. This is a dungeon with context! But the actual play of that result is kind of a let down - I'm not interested in shaming my friends into engaging with the world. Alternatively, if the players do take the time to get to know the necromancer cult, then the output is that the necromancers can pretty safely be ignored. And if I did this trick every single dungeon, pretty soon my players would start to get wise to the idea - "Hey, these people just got here recently! I bet they're not even the real problem!"
I think it does at least fulfil the promise of a dungeon that presents an interesting history that players might have fun engaging with, and with solutions besides just killing everyone inside. I would run it at least once!
That does it for Dungeons & Dilemmas. A fun little text that I wish went just a little further.
Another item shelved in our archive! But since last time we suffered two attacks by the roman legions! Wish me luck - at strength 10, saturday the 23rd, we beat the romans with 45 to their 31 (lucky low roll!), at strength 11, I spent a medal to keep them at 10 dice, and again eke out a victory, getting 43 to their 40. Whew! 5 for reading, 22 paragraphs at 5 points each, and 3 points for rating earns us 118 points - bringing our total to 541! And with two victories in a row, I feel pretty good in claiming the personal pan pizza. The only problem - I recently discovered that I'm lactose intolerant! I'll treat myself to something else, I suppose.
I still have a few items lined up for this round of archive delving heroics, and I have some thoughts about where I'd like to go next, but it probably will be without the dice rolling - the pizza comes with a coupon for free library repairs, so we can shut out the romans for good.
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